As the regular season girls’ high school field hockey schedule nears an end with district tournaments set to begin this week, momentum become key to any team’s success.
For the Mount Vernon Majors, momentum was truly on their side following a 2-1 overtime victory against Langley last Saturday morning. The non-district, regular season contest took place at Langley. With the win, Mount Vernon improved to 9-4.
Following a win in its previous game against Liberty District rival South Lakes, Langley came out strong against what looked like a sluggish Major team. The Saxons had the ball for the majority of the first half and seemed dominant. However, despite out-possessing Mount Vernon, the Saxons failed to get off a single shot in the first half, which led to a 0-0 tie at the half.
The beginning of the second half started out much like the end of the first with the Saxons controlling the ball; however, the difference was that this time, junior Brenna Hill was able to score to put Langley up 1-0.
“At the half, we talked about really keeping up our intensity. There wasn’t one thing that we needed to work on, we just needed to continue to talk to each other,” said Mount Vernon coach Jessica Hebel.
Following the Saxon goal, the Majors seemed to wake up as they began to take control and threaten on the offensive end. It was such a drastic turn around that Langley coach Jennifer Robb was forced to call a timeout to calm her girls down. As it turned out, the timeout was not enough as Mount Vernon would respond with a goal by junior Marcy Hoath less than two minutes after the Saxons took the lead.
<b>IN OVERTIME</b>, the Majors showed that they were the faster team as they broke away several times only to be stopped by junior Saxon goalie Natasha Constantine. Nevertheless, after a failed clear attempt by the Saxons, senior Danielle Home found herself with the ball in front of the net and took advantage with the game-winning goal.
The win was the third straight for Mount Vernon and fourth over its last five games.
“We haven’t been playing as well as we would like so with districts starting soon, this is a good win for us,” said Home.
For Langley, the game will go down as a missed opportunity. Despite possessing the ball for the majority of the game and getting the ball in the circle several times, the Saxons managed just one shot throughout the entire game.
“We possessed the ball a lot, we just couldn’t get it into the circle enough and take shots…we have been working on shooting until we are blue in the face in practice and then we come out here and only take one shot. We were able to take advantage of it and put it in, but we didn’t make their goalie make any saves,” Coach Robb said.
With just one game left before the regular season against Stuart on Oct 14 (results were not available at time of press), the Majors turn to the National District tournament.
“Of course I would like to win the district, but I definitely want to make it to the [Northern] Regional tournament, and most importantly, see them play the best they have played all season,” said Hebel.